Courtesy The California Tech, here is an article about books that make you dumb, which is a recent project of Virgil Griffith, the Caltech grad turkey who created WikiScanner while he was an undergrad.
Basically, Griffith mined Facebook data and correlated peoples' lists of their favorite books with their SAT/ACT scores. He's since gotten a lot of hate mail (for example, because the bible had the 9th best correlation with the low end of SAT/ACT scores---note that I haven't checked how precisely how he measured the correlation, so I can't say what is meant by "low" and I don't care enough to look it up; the plot to which I link shows more detail). Lolita apparently had the highest positive correlation with high SAT/ACT scores, which is also fantastic on several levels (though I found the book thoroughly unenjoyable).
Awesome.
ReplyDeleteI actually found this nearly two weeks ago, and meant to post it, but lost the link. Woohoo!